


Victims of Circumstance - 8/20 – Passing Time

by motsureru



Series: Victims of Circumstance [8]
Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-25
Updated: 2008-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-11 18:02:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/481314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motsureru/pseuds/motsureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for Season 1 and Season 2. This is a <b><span>sequel</span> </b>to <i>Any Other Night</i>, which is a <b><span>sequel</span></b> to <i>Broken Glass.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Victims of Circumstance - 8/20 – Passing Time

**Author's Note:**

> An enormous amount of thanks to [](http://etoile-dunord.livejournal.com/profile)[ **etoile_dunord**](http://etoile-dunord.livejournal.com/), who edits my commas and makes me happy doing it. <3 Also thanks to both [](http://etoile-dunord.livejournal.com/profile)[**etoile_dunord**](http://etoile-dunord.livejournal.com/) and [](http://oximore.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://oximore.livejournal.com/)**oximore**  for their help with the French.

**Teaser _:_** _Sometimes Sylar felt as if he was starving for it. The need to make blood run between his fingers was like the need to touch Mohinder, only he’d settled for the latter alone for over two months now.  
_

 

.8Passing Time

There were times in Mohinder’s life when the world seemed to slow down and pass in a natural progression of days, days where each one was similar to the last and he felt he could get comfortable in that familiarity. The moment he received word of his father’s death, those days had disappeared, and life had been an endless maze of running and desperation in the name of science, revenge, and saving the lives of the innocent.

Now, it seemed, Mohinder found himself once again in a stable life, one that lulled him from one day to the next with no surprises but what he found beneath a microscope. It had been at least a month, and he and Sebastian had settled comfortably into the laboratory and gotten to work dissecting the Shanti virus. The first problem they encountered was a lack of samples: no work of Chandra’s on Shanti survived the test of time (or the Company’s interested grasp, presumably), and with the exception of the files and reports Mohinder had saved onto his computer, all of the work on Molly was still in New York at Kirby Plaza. Furthermore, the actual blood samples taken from Sanjog were delayed in a serious lab mix up back in India. 

Circumstances as they were, Mohinder and Sebastian decided to work with what they had, and what they had was Mohinder. First on their agenda was studying Mohinder’s blood to see what his antibodies could reveal about the way the virus worked. Sadly, Mohinder’s research in that area had been overlooked in New York in favor of his zeal for saving Molly’s life, but now there was plenty of time to study his blood and figure out a way to turn it into a stable solution without the complications of blood type if it were ever needed again.

The result of this revival of intensive research was immediate; Mohinder began coming home a little later each night, a little more exhausted. He brought work with him, poured over it into the late hours while Sylar read at his side, and seemed sometimes to simply haunt the place, mind absent but body still shuffling about. Sylar had voiced his concerns when they ate their morning and nightly meals together, especially when Sebastian and Mohinder had to work with extensive blood samples and Mohinder came back with bruised arms, feeling faint. Sylar prepared the best meals he could to provide nutrition for a man being drained as if by a vampire, and on occasion even got up early enough to prepare Mohinder a lunch too, not knowing if he ate well enough to keep up his strength during the day.

Mohinder was often distracted, though he did take the time to tell Sylar all about what he was doing, animated when he spoke of this breakthrough or that, this new discovery or theory about the connections that might exist between abilities and the virus. It was during those conversations that Sylar spent much of his time with a musing, admiring little smile on his lips before he selected his words. And though he shared that excitement with Mohinder over his work, it seemed like a world away, in Orléans, and he privately doubted that Mohinder would follow through with his promise to bring him in for private research. 

Sylar was fairly sure that Mohinder was oblivious to these thoughts he had. But then again Mohinder was oblivious to many things. Though the rest of the apartment, too, became slowly furnished and decorated to feel like a home, Mohinder seemed to give it little more than passing comments of appreciation, no true enjoyment. He didn’t take his time to sit down on the couch and read for pleasure, or just enjoy a moment of silence or a nap. Mohinder drifted between lab work, conversation, and sleep without thinking too deeply on anything personal of consequence. He didn’t know how Sylar wandered in the days, committing to a very unique memory word after word from his dictionary, taking to the streets and listening to conversations around him, observing a world to which he felt he didn’t belong but that he had to understand. He didn’t know that Sylar stopped almost every day before _Lefebvre_ _montres & réparations_, daring himself to face the ghost of a man he should scarcely remember but he saw in the years of stranger. Nevertheless, what they had was comfortable, and they passed the days easily in each other’s company when they had it.

It began as a morbid sort of hobby for Sylar, passing by the watch shop in the mornings as he looked around. Sylar stared into the window, watched the old man cross the floor slowly, going about his work. Sylar watched him pore over time pieces, meticulously working at each part as though he were a surgeon operating on a child whose life depended on his accuracy. It was perhaps Sylar’s fifth observation or so that had done him in. His fingers itched inside his pockets and his chest tightened when he thought of it, but finally he told himself that fear was something he knew he could conquer, should conquer, if in fact this foolish feeling was fear, and with that thought in mind he ascended the steps to enter.

The inside was not unlike his own shop, all display cases and low lights of an almost antique design. The scent, above all, was the same: old metal and leather, history and antiquity. One could step into a true watch shop and know it from some cheap, modern store, simply because a real master of his art lived buried in that scent among the memories of million faces, each piece ticking away to tell him he was the keeper of some greater record of life, the only one that was a constant.

Sylar stepped inside and at once felt his heart begin to pump faster, the walls of that history feeling as though they might close in. The creak of the floorboards beneath his feet alerted the old man in the back, and soon his fragile figure appeared with a warm smile that lifted the wrinkles from his face.

“Est-ce que je puex vous aider?” He offered these words in a wispy, paper-thin voice and thick accent, but words were all they were to Sylar. At this point, he had been only half-way through the dictionary, and never had he strung such definitions into coherent sentences. Only the word ‘help’ stuck out to him, and he gave a tiny, stiff shake of his head ‘no,’ glancing down at a display case of pocket watches. The old man opened his mouth to speak again, but Sylar was quick to turn on his heel and head right back out the door without a word.

Sylar said nothing to Mohinder of this experience, fearing that a sliver of Gabriel Gray might have burrowed its way back into him, and that his weakness might be seen if he dared even speak a word of the watch shop. Mohinder had more important things to worry about than Sylar’s personal insecurities, he knew, and so he kept his visits to himself.

It became a sort of ritual, then, for Sylar to appear in the shop every couple of days. Whenever Sylar entered, the old man said nothing; he merely greeted Sylar with a small “Bonjour” and continued with whatever he was working on. Sylar might circle the shop a time or two, letting his eyes fall over the faces of clocks or muse over what brand of crystal covering was used, and then he would leave without a word, leaving the rest of his thoughts for another day. The elderly man must have assumed, Sylar thought, that he understood nothing. He was sure that the old man was somehow able to sense Sylar was neither French nor normal, but the man never said a word that was unkind, if he tried to ever speak further than a friendly hello. If he did, it was often a question, sometimes offering him a drink or making a comment about a watch, but Sylar did not reply even to those things that he did comprehend as his vocabulary grew.

There was something of a respect Sylar and the man grew to have for each other in their silences. Sylar came to realize that he felt as though, if he actually came to speak with the man, he wanted to do so on an equal level with him, not through broken sentences and fumbling words. But trying to speak French was far different than simply recalling all the words and their definitions; Sylar found himself many times frustrated by the obstinacy and discourtesy of strangers who took him for the American he was. At times, he simply wanted to dispose of them, like he might have fantasized about with Sebastian, and solve all his disappointments in such strangers at once.

Sometimes Sylar felt as if he was starving for it. The need to make blood run between his fingers was like the need to touch Mohinder, only he’d settled for the latter alone for over two months now. Now and then, he looked at this person on the street or that person over the convenience store countertop, and he simply wanted to pull their faces down by their hair and smash them into concrete and glass surfaces. He wanted to beat in their heads and scream into their blood-riddled faces for all the times they had looked at him oddly or given him a condescending smile for his less than perfect accent. At those times Sylar simply drew in a deep breath, and thought instead of the look Mohinder would give him if such an urge overtook him. That look of fear, mixed with disgust and undeniable hatred. That look that made Sylar feel desolate inside, more lost than he had been back in Iowa. At those times, Sylar regretfully let his urges go, shoulders slumping, and merely turned to walk the other way. He would try again the next day, he promised himself, and his pronunciation would be better then.

Sylar had become particularly aggravated one morning by a woman in the store, who had acted as though she couldn’t understand him when he’d asked a simple question about some fruit he wanted to purchase. Sylar had listened very carefully to others, and knew he did not misspeak, but the woman’s previous experiences with his less successful attempts caused her to give him a familiar clueless look that made him feel as though he should simply wrap his fingers around her throat and strangle slowly her rather than give her the mercy of cutting open her skull and killing her quickly, as he might have a more important victim.

When Sylar had wandered by the watch shop on his way home, jaw still tight with irritation, he noticed through the window the old man bent over a time piece he appeared to have been working on for several days now. Sylar gave in, feeling particularly wound up and predatory, and entered the shop. The old man looked up to greet him with a familiar ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ and then returned his eyes to his work, switching the tools in his trembling hands.

For the first time, Sylar walked directly up to the man, setting down his plastic grocery bags on the floor. He stared down at the device, an antique pocket watch with a brass cover, and felt a short wave of nostalgia sweep him.

“Vous voyez, c'est cassé,” the man explained in a wavering voice, motioning to the piece with an aged smile.

Sylar let his eyes touch the curves of the watch, stroking over the details, taking in the many exposed cogs and springs. It was broken. He gazed down at it intently, feeling all at once a sort of pressure fall away from his body. Sylar had not used many of his abilities in the past weeks. It seemed they had become all but useless, when Mohinder cared for him as a human being, not a person with an ability, and only the covert ones had served him as of late. To see the inner workings of a time piece, to know that feeling of home, gave Sylar a sort of release he hadn’t been expecting; perhaps it was the same sensation of satisfaction he wanted to get by choking the last breath of life from the store clerk.

Holding out his hand, fingers curled in a bit hesitantly, Sylar motioned towards the tool in the old man’s hand. The action caused him to receive a perplexed look, but finally the man relented, passing the item to Sylar. 

Sylar paused a moment, taking from the breast pocket of his jacket a pair of glasses, a thin-framed rectangular pair that sat attractively upon his face when he wore them. He then leaned over his side of the counter, turning the time piece to face him, and very diligently went to work on it. It took perhaps half an hour, and the old man neither spoke nor seemed to breathe as he watched Sylar work carefully at each part, knowing precisely what needed to be replaced out of the tiny pieces that had been laid out at his work station. Sylar switched smoothly between the tools standing in a cup at hand, and when he had finished, he closed the crystal covering overtop, winding the watch with an apparent touch of affection. He set the pocket watch down on the table, ticking away, and gave a quickly fading half smile. 

“Au revoir,” Sylar murmured. He lifted his bags from the floor, headed to the door, and quietly exited the shop, replacing his hands in his pockets with the bags dangling at his wrists. Sylar left the elderly man with a soft look of awe on his wrinkled face as the stranger left his shop, with no idea how much lighter the man’s heart felt. 

 

“What’s the best birthday gift that you remember, Mohinder?” Sylar asked that evening as they sat on the couch in the living room. Mohinder had begun in the bedroom, looking over readouts from his and Sebastian’s latest experiment, but Sylar had a way of changing it up sometimes, sitting in the living room. There was a sort of gravity to his presence, Sylar had come to realize, and Mohinder found himself distracted by Sylar’s absence, inevitably ending up with his white box wherever Sylar had gone to, sitting at his side. It became a sort of game, in a way, that Sylar would occasionally end up in the main room, leaving Mohinder alone, and sure enough, no more than twenty minutes later, Mohinder could no longer focus and would bring his work into the other room as well, propping his feet on their coffee table and leaning back against the sofa where Sylar’s arm stretched out comfortably over the back.

“Best birthday gift?” Mohinder replied absently to the question, flipping over a page in his packet of results. The question took a moment to really hit him, and he lowered his work, looking over at Sylar with an odd expression. “What sort of a question is that?”

“I was just wondering,” Sylar replied, lowering his green book and looking over his glasses at Mohinder. 

The darker man frowned a little, pausing to scratch his head. “My family’s never been big on birthdays… we haven’t all usually been in the same country for most of them. Research had always been pressing, you know, and my birthday’s in the university’s vacation weeks when my father could travel…” Mohinder frowned at that, considering the question further. He tried to think of a moment when he’d been truly happy to celebrate the day he was born, when that day had lit up in comparison to all the others. He could only think of one. “I suppose it would have to be when I was eight or so. I didn’t receive a present, per se… but my father finally came home for my birthday.” Mohinder set his papers down on his lap, mulling on it. “I don’t think he’d ever been there for any of them before that I could remember… he just sent me a small present from wherever he was. But that year… he came home to celebrate. I think I was really happy then.” Mohinder’s voice softened as he spoke of that time. He could remember how his father barely looked at him in those younger years. It had never occurred to him until now that perhaps his father had avoided all those birthday years he might have shared with Shanti, and only after that been able to face his son. Mohinder rubbed a hand over his face and looked over at Sylar. “What about you?”

Sylar slid his glasses from his face and stared at them in his hand. “When I was ten, my father gave me a pocket watch that belonged to his grandfather. He told me it was broken, and that, once I fixed it, I would be a real Gray. I worked for days on it… but finally one of the old metal pieces broke and I didn’t know how to get another one without asking his help, so I got angry and I put it away and never touched it again.” Sylar paused, toying with his glasses between his fingers. “He probably wanted me to ask, but I never did. After he died, I finally took it out and repaired it. But it’s probably sitting in that shop, collecting dust now.” Until today, it hadn’t occurred to Sylar that he would probably never see that precious heirloom again, that precious memory of who Thomas Gray had been.

Mohinder stared at Sylar for a moment, and then he smiled gently, reaching out and brushing his thumb against Sylar’s cheek. “What made you think of that now? Is there something you-”

“No, it was just a passing thought.” Sylar shook his head, replacing his glasses on his nose. Of all people, Sylar felt the need to keep his visits to Lefebvre’s shop secret from Mohinder. There was something deeply personal about them; he felt strongly connected to his quiet visits with the old man, and whatever it was he experienced in those moments, he wasn’t prepared to explain them to the lover who knew only in part what Sylar had left behind.

“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Mohinder sat up and turned a little in his seat. “Sebastian’s going to a conference on Wednesday, and we’ll be wrapping up what we’re working on for now, so I think it will be alright to bring you to the lab to do our own research starting tomorrow. Is that alright with you?”

The perk that came to Sylar’s eyes was visible, and he smiled at that. A taste of the familiar, finally? “That sounds fine; I don’t have anything to do.”

Mohinder chuckled a little at that, reaching out and taking the glasses from Sylar’s face. They seemed at times a sort of toy for Mohinder’s amusement. “I was wondering if you were starting to get bored. Sebastian may have another project to start working on in addition to what we’re doing, so I’ll have the time to do both at once as well. So long as you can behave yourself on the days you come in, that is.” Mohinder gave the man a warning look.

A small smirk came over Sylar’s features, and he leaned in closer, giving Mohinder a playful look. “You mean you don’t want to play doctor with me in the lab? You know how I feel about those needles you put in me, Mohinder.” Sylar tilted his head and pressed his lips to the corner of Mohinder’s mouth.

Mohinder merely rolled his eyes and gave Sylar a little shove. “We play enough doctor at home for you to be able to behave yourself in public. I hope.”

Sylar grinned slightly to himself and leaned back again, taking his glasses from Mohinder’s hands. “I’ll be good, Doctor Suresh, I promise.”

 

 

“Day number five without the meds,” Peter spoke, seemingly to himself, walking slowly towards the wall.

“Then I think it’s time to try,” came the echoing voice through the grate in the wall, an ever-present reminder of Peter’s own captivity within Company bindings. He had thought all this time that his presence here was voluntary, a measure of protection he gave the world from the hazards of his simply being alive. For a long time, Peter had worried about his abilities and what harm they might have done to others, but Adam Monroe had shown him, over his months here within white and gray walls, that he was wrong. The real danger here was the company that locked him up against his will and misguided his good intentions.

Peter pressed his palms to the gritty cement blocks, pushing them forcefully as his brows knit in concentration. He focused deeply, but when nothing happened he made a noise of frustration.

“Come on Peter, you can do it,” Adam insisted from the other side, ever supportive.

Taking a deep breath, Peter pushed again, and when he found that the wall slipped away like a thin sheen of a fog beneath his palms, he stumbled, standing with arms half encased in what was no longer stone-like at all. An almost childish smile found its way onto his face, and he quickly walked through, watching as pipes and cement passed before his vision as though they were nothing, until the inside of another cell was within his view.

Before Peter stood a man about his height, though more slender, with blonde hair coupled to a receding hair line, but whose face did not speak of the years his eyes did. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” Peter said. “You know, for four hundred years you’ve held up pretty well.”

Adam gave a small smirk, but no real amusement showed on his features. “Come on. Let’s go heal your brother.”

 


End file.
